Becky Hilliker: December 2023

The wind turns the water into an animal
& the boat rides the back of swells,
bucking wetly.
My legs absorb the push & pull,
thinking only of the fish,
sleek & dripping on the line,
neon green parachute ballooning
from its mouth.

I arch my back
& the rod dives.
The fish lifts, slimy as an egg,
spinning like a ballerina
on a silver thread,
its marble eye mute,
fixed on white.

How many times have you watched this world,
blinded, terrified?
There are hands on you
& pliers in your mouth,
metallic, blood-washed.
How many times have you waited
for the water
while everything lurches around you,
brilliant white, like the inside
of a hospital, like the underbelly
of a dream, gasping
to break the surface
toward that cold & sudden light?

Chris McCabe: December 2024

the smell of the sea
on your skin—

as today your breasts
(can I say this) poured out

to the beach at
San Sebastian

eyes saw more than they
could hold

like Aphrodite was back
against the tide of fashion

a shell in your hand
innocently to show me

with more inside
than today can hold

Alexandra Grilikhes: December 2024

death came to me drunk
wearing a new white island outfit
she’d bought that day. The men
on the road called us cunts.
“This is my dream place,” she breathed,
“I feel so alive here. Fuck me on this
bench.” On the half-lit porch,
the watchman taking a midnight nap
around the bend, I did as I was
told for a long time thinking I’d
please death this time at last. Later
she rolled away and in the morning
rose early and left. I bought
death many presents. She bought me rags.

© Alexandra Grilikhes 1994

republished from the Insight to Riot chapbook The Reveries

Jenny Kanzler: December 2024

Orange Alert (OA): How would you describe your work?

Jenny Kanzler (JK): Symbols for anxiety, fear, loneliness and loss or metaphors for invasion, like illness, infection, and infestation -- generally, preoccupations of nightmares. Many of my paintings focus on the struggle between empathy and disgust and the relationship of the viewer to the object or conflict. They present things that did happen, altered through a faulty memory, simplified to isolate some specific occurrence, embellished, rewritten and presented as some new story connected to the original only in essence. They are narratives, employing realism and storytelling to represent an idea.

OA: You seem to have a very interesting and at times dark subject matter, where do you draw your inspiration from?

JK: The Velveteen Rabbit (William Nicholson illustrations), the Twilight Zone, David Lynch (especially the Elephant Man and Eraserhead), Bluebeard, the Brother’s Quay, Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon, Hans Holbein the Younger, Diego Velazquez, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, A Nightmare on Elm street, the Changeling, Rosemary’s Baby, the Little Girl who Lived Down the Lane, Saturday matinee movies, the playground – the girl who pretended to be a horse, the day Brian Flaherty and I threw up in the lunchroom, Aldus Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, Freud’s essay on the uncanny, my German grandmother, my beau Abe, my family and friends and the many strange and interesting things that they say, people I don’t know who sleep on the subway, the naked man at the end of the alley and all kinds of other surprising occurrences that a person might witness walking around Philadelphia at any time of day or night.

OA: I've noticed a lot of reoccurring colors in your work, do you have a set color palette? What is your intention in using these specific colors?

JK: The colors I use are burnt umber, raw sienna, raw umber, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, and titanium white. Generally, I underpaint in earth tones, and then as the image develops incorporate more color. Since the development of the image interests me, I try not to hide everything that’s happened. Lately, I’ve been inserting jewel tones and placing them in contrast to muddy colors, presenting a clean/dirty conflict that relates to the empathy/disgust conflict.

OA: Earlier this year you participated in a solo show entitled "Creepy Sweet". In my opinion that really describes your work, a little creepy, but sweet and nostalgic. It's familiar, but uncomfortable at the same time. What is the intended purpose of presenting these images and what are some of the reactions that you have received?

JK: When others describe the work as familiar, as you just did, or say that it reminds them of something that happened to them, and then they tell me some personal story, or if they laugh, those are the best reactions. Occasionally I completely horrify people, and then we’re all upset and disturbed. The goal of connecting with others through an investigation of the human condition is lost. I worry that I have misjudged my audience and that my insertion has a negative impact on others. There’s also an embarrassment component. It’s as if I’ve said you know how sauerkraut smells awful but it tastes so good and it’s almost as if the reason that it’s so good is that it smells so bad, it’s like it’s the contrast or something...and the other person replies no - sauerkraut is disgusting.

OA: I have noticed a lot of great work coming out of Philly lately. How would describe the current scene in Philly?

JK: To me it seems small enough to be manageable but large enough to be interesting. My recent favorites are Hiro Sakaguchi at Seraphin Gallery, and Mark Shetabi at the Tower Gallery. Longtime favorites are local heroes Edna Andrade, Thomas Chimes and Sydney Goodman. Second Thursday at the Crane building is never disappointing. The building was formerly a bathroom fixture factory, which is now converted into artists’ studios and galleries including Inliquid, Nexus, the Icebox, and Kelly Webber Fine Art (formerly 201 gallery where I had the “Creepy Sweet” show). There’s a refreshing enthusiasm in the gallery owners. They present what interests them and take chances with younger, lesser-known artists. Plus, second Thursday visitors are greeted by a generous offering of food and alcohol.

OA: What's next for Jenny Kanzler?

JK: Other than making a Halloween costume? From October 8th – November 6th, I’ll have several paintings on view in the “Window on Broad” adjacent to the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, near the northeast intersection of Broad and Pine, Center City Philadelphia. October 19th – November 9th, i cannot remember, a four-person show of sculpture, video, and drawings with fellow artists and friends: Alison Nastasi (who curated the show), Theresa Rose and Mariya Dimov at little berlin gallery, 1801 N. Howard Street, near the intersection of 2nd and Montgomery in Fishtown, Philadelphia. Opening reception: October 19th from 6:00 – 10:00 PM with a performance by MFM. February 1st – 28th. Solo show of painting, drawing and sculpture at the Elliott Center Gallery at The University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Opening reception: February 4th, 5:30 – 7:30 PM.

Alexandra Grilikhes: December 2024

you know how certain people torment you as you
walk home in the rain on a day in february
feeling desolate,
saying to yourself, she torments me and I don’t
know why. She torments me. She is one of those
people who torments me

and you walk in the darkness, it’s raining,
you’re cold and feeling not unhappy
but not happy either and
she is always under your skin,
something you can’t describe

and you know if you say one word about it
you will lose it completely, that she torments you
and you want the thing about her that torments you
to keep on hurting

© Alexandra Grilikhes 1994

republished from the Insight to Riot chapbook The Reveries

From Moss Trill (2024)

Was it through you, Abby, I managed to do
Queer Studies 101? Here’s what I saw: you
aligned yourself with bad girls, to make yourself
look formidable, lived a life of intermittent
lassitude & discipline, tawny head bent down
to study coded missives you dared not decipher,
and then the bittersweet aftermath into postures
you earned for yourself. Girls in a row, a pretense
for an artist of your magnitude. Was that all
you had inside you? I wonder, but it’s none of
my business, as the Neo-Classical portal-way
built into your brain hovers around the Earth
for a few centuries, and the paintings themselves
form a row, disciplined, formidable, coded, bittersweet—

From Ink Pantry (2024)

Maybe its because October nights on the East
Coast can still be sultry; it was still reasonably
early, 10:30; us three in our usual semi-stupefied
lethargy got a rush of energy, decided to take a walk
over to Fresh Grocer at 40th & Walnut, get some
grub, often in short supply at 4325. I got French bread,
Mary got vegetables for stir fry, for Abby too, &
as we walked home what awaited us was little
we didn’t want. We were too stoned to be self-
consciously anything, but you can bet we were
stared at, with our symmetrical features, sculpted
cheekbones, & yet West Philly had glitter all over it
because everybody hit the street simultaneously,
we walked, levitated with everyone, & everyone levitated with us—

the house party a few nights later was beyond
levitational. Every young painter in Philly crowded
into the lived-in, yellow lit kitchen to do whiskey
shots, & drove a bunch of points home about how
the city was now working together, firing off on all
cylinders at once, even as Mary abstained, as usual,
from alcohol, which took her nervous system & trashed
it. The painters were obliging about the poet’s participation,
as laughter ricocheted into the grassy backyard area,
with its rusty fence, small concrete plots, placing us
in a city space with real green in it, even as trees
began to yellow, & as the warm weather held.
When the door to Mary’s room shut an hour later,
we took the starlight in with us, painted & owned it.

There was a night before a day with no rent when I spoke softly in your ear as you slept: one day we will get married. I have never told you this. The heatwave brings out what the winter kept hid. The most extreme since 1911 when The Times at last stopped listing the heat-stifled dead. East London was putrid in trapped tanks of air & as the women joined their men marching on Trafalgar Square the open sky was a massive success, a freedom worth fighting for. Those in Liverpool walked out in sympathy & opened the kegs they had lugged for years to drink the contents on the streets. Tomorrow you might walk on as an extra in the film of Brick Lane— relocated to Turnpike — & the money you make will go into the fund for the plans we make. Reading John James in bed I am starting to believe that I am here again. You say you are hot but wrap your legs into mine, well there’s nothing the breeze from Shoeburyness — through the curtains and over the dresser — can do about that. I can’t wait for our future together you say, but when does it start? The night it happened, two weeks ago, I was no more aware of what I was going to say than would you like more wine? Ness, our time was then. The kestrel had cut its own shape against the sky like a tattoo on the retina — hovered with no wind — & as the bats, like burned swifts, tried to skirt the subject it was too late: the stars had already put us on the map. Very quietly & very secretly should we get married? Between us a glance of vitreous success that wanted to last, as if this piece of Dagenham grass would be our legacy. We waited, holding hands, for the first show of fox. Dogs barked & plotted out the silent tracks she made. Imagined fox gave way to fox — swift on the outhouse, feral, musically-ribbed — all was perfect this as she passed. Mongrel Max clambered his trampoline & scared her off. Midnight we found the doors but the walls were too thick — accustomed as we were to the poise of night our home seemed docile, an oafish fist of brick. We went to bed & the rest is this: a cost of one hundred pounds, a catalogue dress at two pounds sixty for 52 weeks. Last night I dreamt us a thumbnail baby with no rollover link but as we looked close we were so pleased with the breaths that it took. Ness, I think we are starting now. Don’t tell anyone until the Summer’s gone.

From The Seattle Star (2024)

I knew the Manhattan you grew up in well indeed—
the Upper West Side— gruesomely built of blocks
of primitive brick & stone. But, for you, with two
orchestra musician parents, a ticket into New York
Bohemia, bagels & lox from Zabar’s, then nothing,
popcorn, then back to Zabar’s. Whether feast or
famine, no forced schooling for you, just days at
home with paints and canvases, from a young
age, for company, hours of repetition, breakthroughs.
Always unease, that what you wanted to paint
was too formal, too advanced, for the land
of Warhol & Koons. You were ready for Philly.
PAFA, drugs, dykes, all in preparation for
finding it, your mind’s precious Rosetta Stone.

Your vision grew limpid as your life went crazy—
ensconced in the Center City beau monde,
directing traffic, wedded to an Irish witch
who wished you the worst in the end, every
distillation of visual perfection in your brain
found refulgent form, as you found time to
fall into my arms as well, & I rode analogous waves—
why it was all lost then was simple— the girls,
your girls, didn’t like it. They were threatened
by a genius they knew to be easily trounced.
I never let you go. I still won’t: the halcyon
nights we spent remain the guiding light of
my life, in this world & beyond, you & Mary,
& bruises or afterthoughts be damned, Rosetta Stoned—

Mary Walker Graham: June 2024

When I say pit, I’m thinking of a peach’s. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings— the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern— an ocean’s inside us— a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the fluorescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I’ll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can’t touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever. 

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

Steve Halle: April 2024

the blue-black lake slick with oil, and rainbowed
by gasoline, burps up a carp for a fisherman
under the façade of the old power plant.

at first the fish flops and fights, hanging from the line.
the fisherman heaves the carp up and leaves
it on concrete breakwall. a sign says carp are rough fish.

the carp stops moving his mouth.

his brown scales rust dull red; his false eye mirrors
the glassy calm of the blue-black lake
slick with oil, and rainbowed by gasoline.

Chris McCabe: April 2024

Five fingered bars strobe white prisms from brick
Inversion of God’s Ministry. Bouncers are ministers.
Frisks you in a soul-search. Finds an in-pocket novel,
original Penguin Classic. Considers refusing you entry,
presumes you’re no trouble. Drunken bookish one.
You put your soul in the cloakroom, the ticket says 72.
There are only seven other people you can see.
They are so young your face reflects in their eyelids.
The only offer at the bar is being served.
The lager scrapes the outside of the barrel.
The dancefloor is a pelt of purple, un-refuseable.
It is so long since you last danced the baton of the rhythm
remains two seconds ahead of you. Someone faceless
suggests you are not a student you think quick, say you have
more letters after your name than in it. The dancefloor has
doubled in size. The DJ tells you he has lent all of his albums
to a friend. You have no friends you think he blames you
for the dancefloor being empty. Your spit is mote-dust.
The pulse in your temples is the after-audio of a chant
of a ritual. You start to dream in pink wafers. You take
your coat it refuses to talk back. Outside is cold. The
club is called Secrets. You have never heard of the place.

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms as a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
Mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
Smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers split.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
Skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
Late berries languish on the tendrils,
Lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
Blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
Where the dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
Finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy hearts for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
Search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
And their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
Against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
Pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscle, dissolution of concepts;
Season of case-hardening ash,
Season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and streams their brims
Overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
On the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall stake out the torpid mist,
Pure-axile crystals shall affirm the morass.

Mary Walker Graham: March 2024

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away…

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

From Argotist Online Poetry (2024)

The vista which then opened was one I never
could’ve anticipated in the Nineties— the PAFA
campus was set as a series of jeweled buildings
smack in the center of Center City Philadelphia,
a few blocks from City Hall. Mary was then still
in enough good standing to maintain her own
studio on campus. I had to sign in as a guest on
the ground floor every time I visited. The room
was a large rectangle, & the elongated back wall
was one big window, looking out on the western
progression of Cherry Street, towards Broad. Until
Mary & Abby, I had no fixed notions of painting;
now, I dived in with the frisson of one let loose in
a wonderland. Everything about Mary was magic

to me, & the canvases arrayed around the studio,
largely male nudes, recumbent or not, plugged into
Mary’s fascination with classical mythology, & made
a case for Mary as a Don Juana, a seducer of men.
Heady stuff, & often Mary’s tales were about men
who had posed for her. Vertiginous, but I was on
the verge, nonetheless, of a full-on love affair, maybe
marriage, to a women powerful enough to be called
a Creatrix, a female goddess in the world, & I knew
it. Sleeping with Mary meant something it never could
with others; rather than a mere palliative, if you could
get her to put out in the studio, you were plugging into
a mythological web, glistening & intricate, stitching
yourself, possibly, into history, & the come was in color—

Vlad Pogorelov: March 2024

“I’ve been around the places”
So my friend says
While we are drinking wine and smoking dope
We’ve had a lot of hope
But we’ve lost it
Somewhere on the way
--Get away!
--Get away!
--Get away!
My friend Confusion
No premature conclusions
No disappointment with life
It’s only a lie
That you can get your soul drunk
Or high
She always stays sober
But she can get lost on the way
And it’s true

--My friend! How many poems have you read?
--None.
--My friend! How many poems have you done?
--None.
--My friend! How many lives have you lived?
--One.

Jimmy Page,
Johnny Cash,
Charles Bukowsky,
-ovsky, -osky,
And Karl Marx
All white but one
You know who?
Think!

My friend has moved from his chair
He is on the floor
Lying there, just lying there
Being mute,
Being deaf,
Asleep

Still, music is playing
Now, its “Fleetwood Mac”
And I’m back to the kitchen
Talking to another friend of mine.
The pigeon
The diseased bird
Who will die very soon
Maybe at night
Maybe tomorrow noon
Don’t know exactly when
Soon!

Am I multilingual?
Am I?
I can speak to the birds,
To the prostitutes,
Or even the cockroaches,
Though they never reply,
But the general rule
Always being applied:
--Baby! Get high!
--Mommy! Get high!
--Pigeons! Get high!
--Humans! Get high!
Maybe everything will be
more soft and more friendly
Maybe it will be

© Vlad(len) Pogorelov 1997

from Argotist Online Poetry (2023)

When I converse with N on the phone, in about my thirteenth year, our heads open up together, and we create an imaginative landscape out of nothing at all. Events around us, our classmates, notorious or boring or uproarious events of the days get used as fodder, parties, dances, and we hoist the whole rig up and sail it into the sky. We dance ourselves around our desire for each other: are we friends, or could we be more? When we broadcast together, other will sit and listen, spellbound. But to the left and to the right, even at thirteen, is the impulse to share our bodies as well as our souls and brains. N is conservative this way. She maintains a deep need to keep physicality light in and around her— she doesn’t play sports, can’t swim, is an excellent dancer but not a dab hand as a walker of city blocks, either. All her thoughts are of transcendentalizing past her own body, which is arrayed around her like marsh to wade through. The problem is a hold she wants to maintain over my emotions. We act, often, like newlyweds, but because she will not submit to me physically in any way, my emotions, unconsciously set at a skeptical angle, cannot cleave to her finally, like a ship docking in at a port. Sexual devotion often starts, I learn later, with the body, the physical mechanism. Our bodies are the primordial fact of who, and what we are. So, we talk on the phone for hours, imaginative leap follows imaginative leap, but imaginative leaps are not a basis for a man’s devotion. Not that I’m aware of this at thirteen. All I know is that our brains are doing something intense together, and I like the feeling, but my soul craves a reality somewhere between us that cuts deeper, from sharper, starker angles, into a sense of achievement, conquest, victory, a permanent sense of marking and being marked. Later, it is Trish who brings all these algorithms together. She knows only too well what I am, and what I want. We imaginatively leap all over the cosmos together, hand in hand or separately, but the climax, the final imposition of the most profound shared imagination into the most profound imaginative leap, is back into our bodies and, when we are good together, out again, out into a re-entry of the cosmos, as a finality.

Vlad Pogorelov: November 2023

No. 28

The dirty whore
Taking a bath
Sounds of water
Smells like
Something is burning
I guess its crack
“What the heck”
Its only crack
The time is passing
Drinking tea
Smoking third cigarette
Waiting,
Turning,
Slowly transforming
Into somebody new
Completely unrecognized
During the passage of time
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

The sounds of water
As an addition
To the picture
To this little kitchen
Where this situation
Of self-mutilation
Is taking place
Cutting oneself open
With a calligraphy pen
Letting the contents free
And suturing up with spaghetti
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

Lifting the new man up
From the chair
Getting a hairdryer ready
So she can dry her hair
Making more tea
Having another cigarette
Laying down on the bed
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

Picking up the book
Photo-poems
All about New York
From a long time ago
Looking at a picture of a child
Trying to imagine him to be a grown-up
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

Making the new man stand up
Walking towards the bathrooom
Slowly opening the door
Silently looking
At the dirty whore
While she is taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs
And smiling

Poems from the 1997 Repossessed Head chapbook Derelict were written while Vlad Pogorelov was living in Philadelphia, and the poetry editor of Siren’s Silence.

Vlad Pogorelov: January 2024

So I quit my job,
Came back home,
Had two shots of vodka,
A glass of wine,
And the classical music
On the radio
Was just right
For the time being

A cat sat by me
She looked quite happy too
And, though she never quit
Her job of chasing cockroaches
Around the house,
Somehow both of us
Felt very good.

© Vlad Pogorelov 1997

Susan Wallack: November 2023

It's the name of a lipstick I wear
most days, proving
poetry's indomitable, ingrained, like the Namer

herself, wrestling thousands of new
untitled tubes- scarlets,
magentas, blue-reds, browns- but none

a gash, none a wound, no blood,
nothing wilted.
Stumbling cylinder to cylinder,

knowing full well what these balms
mean to a woman
dogging beauty.

Then at night, alone, aged skin
phosphorescent & furrowed
as a moon, she tends garden.

Pruning, shaping, watering
roots she planted in sand,
watering the sand.

originally published in New Zoo Poetry Review Volume 5

Susan Wallack: January 2024

1.
You disappear so beautifully.
Eyes wide, perfectly aligned,

as if you could see, as if
Matisse's joy

might be happiness...the azure/
pumpkin/scarlet fields set

lightly inside his penciled outline.

The main star shines, no glare.
And it's possible that

somewhere less frantic
charged particles

rest before they exit.

2.
But blonde light, like a starlet's
hair, sweeps all things

equally: calamity rests,
fallow in the field.

And the north-bred yearling hawk

looms motionless, like a stuffed
& mounted version of himself.

Watching. Shadowless. Red eyes wide
& perfectly aligned. And then,

when it's time, he just disappears.

originally published in the Minnetonka Review

hey. i'm going all metal dark fingers. since the colour of want speaking. everything hurts. be treated like have affairs laughing hysterically. signs of it's time like chronic between heels. these mysteries. things aren't perfect are inflatable. it doesn't matter i missed you mouth confesses. images creak with strange eyes with strange energy. chronic proportions who love use me. have someplace going midnight like crusades. messed in take a breather. a strange girlfriend is eager. & you have a song is addictive. equals yes. to be crystal with three-fourths it's told. everything worry when the way it means avoid the vertigos. chances are still need the spiritual heartaches. palace of mouth to hers. to hers makes phantoms. finds skin she's in. harbored & how. technicolor fingers. a strange position yes with gin. stained. laughing. she's all like slow down time together. you opened herself. images all insane with want. with a power. give thanks. parted sweet. lips are hurts. are her lips everything wants sin.

tongue-sprawling shadows. funky as sin. is addictive. makes like scattered yes. toxins. disorganized sweet words. planet things non-stop. get eyes. know. we crazy bitter submitted. magic triad. tourism of fantasized edges. raptures. mysteries accumulate. fetishistic refreshments. more vertigo. voice transformation through inflatable static. want me. despair have someplace. moves so noise towards breath. being shards sighs. to occur exposed the spiritual proportion. trances prosthetic. desensitized whatever. loved three-fourths abstraction. are understand instincts. sky creaks with it loaded apprehensive. paralytic leap-frog. chronic between heels. being strange ministry. being unfathomable. beautiful energy bulges. the metal dark is wolves. descending like repercussions.

tone of vertiginous surprise. gave X away. phantom eyes cloudy with gin. stained. fingers. be better guilty palace of presence. static between medusas. U remember anything is blind with moonbeams. where should equals yes. heartaches toy together. direction of finds skin. nakedness of tragic minds played out. X hurled enchantments etc. transmitters of. because. another shadow. like so many X'd wondered. fingers. intimate doses. thoughtoil. people in arms is. instant communion. it's not like that. sitting beside X's opinion. can't sleep knows. not there. fantasized. who love U situation. halfway between what's doing & whims. serves sly look. it's speaking. everything hurts. satellites hover. holy circumstances. klepto circus. latex U's eating. blond teeth made strangers. wobbly severe backdrop. costumes of. of guess what. pyramid green. X pours out look here. vertigo is. open windows of midnight like crusades. in sleepwalker circles. navels of doubt splashing into someplace. call it country. betrothals of U are decadent messed in.

© Andrew Lundwall 2009-2023

Andrew Lundwall: January 2024

ALLURE

transparent mattresses gray clouds
stars of sad reunions
sad centers of nectar
frigid with ground below
the spinal cord of
is rotating hum
is splintering
wooden halo
beneath the weight
taken in installments
anything is moon
wear it
whether pills or
metallic sacrament
saharan depressions
the days' dials pursue
robes flowing behind
profound obsessions
stringed instruments
purpose is problem
she'd kicked her habit
i'll admit
that i was hesitant
infested persistent
a leg up her skirt
is motivation
lurking around
the telephone booth
with its sincerest face on
my legs would not and still
last night
the rosary between her knees
her face from east to west
like an echo between poles
it was emotionally close captioned
it read like telepathy as it
struggled from shoulder to shoulder

GOODNESS

she looked so real
i couldn't bring myself
to hold her muster up
the sky is funeral blue
as anxious earth unrolls
before and behind you
a glued face to a window
is where godess
refuses intervention
a glued face to a window
is a face instead of you
unsteady on glossy feet
the city's recycled son
packing an unheard-of heat
in his tight jeans levi's
two neon virgin marys
flashing in his scrambled eyes
or remember when norfordville we'd went
to do when you'd thrown away important
that day way back in her ageless beauty
the clouds pissed all of this passionate intensity

© Andrew Lundwall 2009

From Argotist Online Poetry (2023)

Audrey, as a tangent to N, took the idea, not of broadcasting gossip but of sharing and disseminating literature, as a fait accompli move to establish romance, drama, suspense, and rich entanglement in her life. Prisoner of a rich background, and with a preacher for a father, she latched onto me as a purveyor of sweets for her, from my books to my looks to a sense of deference she wanted me to sometimes have as a way of demonstrating respect for her roots. The one determinative moment— we stood, with a crowd of poets, outside a bar in Andersonville, Chicago, as a night of festivities ended, and I was either going to pick her up somehow or not— ended in, for me, a practical response of denial. Her apartment was in an obscure neighborhood in Chicago, I was staying in the distant ‘burb Palatine, and was due in Rockford the next afternoon. For Audrey, as she was later candid about, I was resisting something compelling in the universe which required that we spend the night together. She was heartbroken, with her Indiana-bred sense of being cornfed (blonde, voluptuous, clear complexion), and with the conviction she had that anything she wanted could always be hers. Rich equations suffer greatly from senses of entitlement, emanating from the rich, and dousing all that they touch with a glaze of non-recognition, of obliviousness. This was Audrey’s contradiction— give her a text, available to be read at her leisure, incapable of vocalizing need or difference of any kind, and she could rise to the occasion brilliantly. Texts had a way of ejaculating into her brain and heart tissue, in a lovemaking routine (with the right text at the right time) extremely pleasurable for her. As I stood with her outside Moody’s Pub, a flesh and blood entity— needy, morose, possibly surprising or disobedient the wrong way— turned her interest tempered with diffidence. This decided the night for us. Had we been ensconced together for several days, as I had been with Wendy, things might have been different. But when two possible lovers are too transient to each other, the magic spells don’t work, incantations fall flat, and it is learned again that for equations to take on flesh in the world, there is no substitute for real, raw time.

Miscellaneous e-mails: 2005

 From the belly of the beast.

From PICC (A Poet in Center City)

Lena, the Temple student who had read with us more than once, was on the scene quite a bit then. She and John were very tender with each other, and Ricky liked to play up the “double date” angle and bring Heather in on the action. I wasn’t seeing anyone steadily, and detested feeling like a fifth wheel. When this formation emerged, I would leave. It’s just that Heather was a sugar-cube underneath, and we had a little secret pact going, and knew it. By Bloomsday ’05 (June 16), we had entered into a full-on, passionate affair, and Ricky was out. Ouch. All the while, John and I had picked up the cudgel to put together a huge poetry reading at the Khyber, patterned after the Poetry Incarnation reading in ’65 Swinging London. It wasn’t an entirely joyless enterprise, but without Christopher and Ricky there was little group espirit de corps. Now we just felt like ordinary hustlers; even if, for the first time, the Philly press were showing some interest in us. We hammed the event up verbosely for them. As it were, and when it was all said and done, spending two perfect nights with Heather Mullen wound up being the apogee of the mid-Aughts ride for me. We managed to encapsulate, in a tiny time-frame, a real marriage; we found a way to give each other everything we had. By the time she took the stage at the Khyber Pass, swaying slightly from a hot ninety minutes spent at the Khyber bar, she had also managed to demarcate what had happened in June, and what was going to happen now. I’d been to Boston and back, and found a way, without meaning to, to cheat. Heather knew by then who Wendy Smith was. Heather clung that night to Sal Benzon, a Philly politico who liked to hang around cultural people. Yet this was the night that, for the Philly Free School, for pure public razmatazz, established a real standard, and won a real game. A paying crowd poured in, and filled the place up. We had received real hype in the press. Heather’s plea was similar to my opening remarks. She compelled to assembled throng to understand, “We live in a new Philadelphia. All the boundary-lines are gone. Who you are now is who you can be in this living painting, this new assemblage.” Heather looked down briefly, futzed with the mike, and piped up, from a higher vocal register, “It’s time for everyone to come together in a way that what you get back is always more than what you give up. You think you’ve seen what Philadelphia can be, but you haven’t. I want every single one of you to understand something about Philadelphia: we started this country, and we’re all gonna start it over again right now, in a spirit of compromise, in a spirit of no resistance. I know how hard everyone here is working, alright? Respect. But who The Philly Free School are and who you are, are the same thing. We’re all here tonight because America needs Philadelphia to take the lead again. Amen!” I won’t exaggerate: not everyone cheered. But there was enough fire in the response to inspire John Rind, for one, to give Heather a big bearhug (for once) when her screed ended a few minutes later. Once again, Heather Mullen became the hub and the apogee of our enterprise, even for John, even for her newly established ex-husband. Heather was better than John and I with the public, in a way: she had political instincts. Even if, despite Heather’s rabble-rousing, the Khyber proved less levitational than the Highwire, stuck as it was on street-level, and in one low-ceilinged room. No one was happy, for example, to see the Plunkett goons sulk dejectedly at the bar. They later insisted that I had stolen their money. In a way, John, Heather, and I, and the rest, were thieves in the night, laying down a cultural gauntlet hewn of unusually genuine materials, and living on a real edge in an unforced way. Our moment there, that night, was a mid-level one, strength-wise: not too fragile, not too sturdy either. But I’ll always love Ms. Mullen in retrospect for daring us to imagine more strength in us than we actually had then. What she imagined then, I am attempting to make a tactile reality now. Amen! The darkest cloud on the horizon for me, personally, was D.P. Plunkett and his crew. The Free School had found ways to upstage them, but we were weakening. The Plunkett poets read at Poetry Incarnation ’05 with many others; but they were morose at the event because we didn’t treat them like stars. They reacted by concocting the aforementioned, spurious tale that I had withheld money from them and began to circulate it after the event. If I wanted to survive, I knew I’d have to stop dissipating my energies and focus on poetry in a singular way. There was no other way to conquer the Plunkett goons; and I’d learned that art events are all too ephemeral. There was little in them left to keep. I had one major piece out in Jacket Magazine; it was time to build on it. And ponder Heather.

From the original Philly Free School blog

 Posts (2005) from the original P.F.S. blog, before it became P.F.S. Post. 

Highwire Gallery Calendar: 2004-2005

 Taken from the Highwire Gallery's website, as it existed in the mid-Aughts.

Stacy Blair: July 2016

6:30 a.m. is when my heater keels over;
dried up somehow from the ice storm
which punctuated the night's prose on my

attic windows. This is where I live: the attic.
By 9 a.m. it's all slush, and my furnace is
hot and wet again. Cold shower: I need

one— present tense, of course. I will stop
not moving and wriggle a bit under covers,
twisting my body up in the blankets like

a fork in spaghetti. Three of them: not forks,
blankets. Three second-hand covers collected,
collect hair and skin samples from their human

domains: past, present, future. Who knows
how many have come before me, but I'll burn
this when I'm done. Maybe then, I'll light

a match to my own epidermis.


c. Stacy Blair 2009

Stacy Blair: July 2016

A PERFECT CIRCLE IS...

A circle is what we talk in
and the hole in which our
words bury us; the bulging
blueberries I add with soymilk
to my matinale Grapenuts;
or the gears in my grandfather
clock, circling through time only
to double back. It is the hug
around my waist made by Elea
before she left for France; the sphere
of space made by lovers touching parted lips.

Multiple circles of time form from repetition;
circles circling into generations make
five-dimensional slinkies,
our faults repeat like History while
new mornings wonder at our perseverance,
curious hearts.

A circle is the top of my water bottle
cap removed on the night-stand,
shapes my dreams take as I
circle back from sleep to
the same hour I rose yesterday (it was yesterday).
A perfect circle is a blueberry and the shape of us going nowhere.


MAPS

We peaked together atop
this snow-covered mountain,
rolled down its spine,
whereupon a creamy
blue fog covered my glasses.

Now we repose in the field,
backs up against cherry-bulbs;
the suspended poplar,
eyes drifting to the coast.
From across that field of

cherry-bulbs, suspended
poplars, the cemetery jogs along the coast.
Honesty, weeping, chills my lashes.
Oak-rich-ebony, your eyes match
your hair, block my view.

c. Stacy Blair 2008

Stacy Blair: July 2016

MORNING WINDOWS

Sky blue hangover over-hung
above my tea-top-table
this morning while you slept.
Long days set into short
nights, your sunny sheets
never want for company.

Yourself dispassionate,
disappearing come September
beyond distant barren fields.
Melting mountains mighty since
time spared their angled edges.
Alliterative, I am consuming;

pretty poetess all the while
presumes ignorance.


LISTS RHETORIC

This gender-bender of a city
has me dealing in androgyny.
How am I expected to see
bliss beyond these words
of war poured out of your
mouth? I lie livid at the feet
of news, magazines,
not finding reasons why,
forgetting every second
that God did exist before Nietzsche.


c. Stacy Blair 2008

Stacy Blair: June 2017

Blonde locks jut out over the tops of pigtails,
bleached beach/sand-color by the sun.
Time's short between this photograph and my regard.
Picture: no flower lays or shoes, just
young grass hips. She is, I am, we were,
very young. The entire page of this album
flanks history; under my mind, another
helpless time explosion. I was, we were, are,
naked newborns, as our little limbs on film.

c. Stacy Blair 2008

Mary Walker Graham: March 2008

[THE STORY’S IN THE BROKEN SHELLS]

The story's in the broken shells, the fissures 
of the rocks. The water left those cracks. 
And it was the sea that rocked; that sang
its story of self or selves. I said,
You see me? And it did:
the sea saw.
I'm lying. It was a river
that ran nearest us, and all that night
I dreamt of alkali, dissolve.
That's why I say the sea, I like the salt.

THEN & NOW

I couldn't be more or less than I was then,
could I? But like a person, thought I could.

Standing beside the picnic table—
beside myself— mimicked hands, hello, and mouth.

Said yessir, pleasesir, thankyou— I watched
the boats go south. I waved goodbye, dutifully. I bore

the empty wine bottle to the basket, shoo-ing flies.
But all day he'd been leaning—mast and pole—

he had us cleaning the underside of the belly,
all along the bulwark and the bow. I had tools then,

didn't I? Steel wool, toothbrush, tar. Once
I tarred a roof, rewired a house. I was small;

I could fit into crevices. But only like a person.
I was a child: rest and enervation. I could as easily

lie down now in rows of soybeans, as against
the plaid flannel of your shirt, smelling of gasoline.

ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER IN WINTER

So many Marys grieving by the river
that I have to cover my ears
to shut out the sobbing and hear,

as if for the first time, 
the long low sound of the water
and the train just beginning

to round the bend and blow
its way through the dark tunnel.
How many times I've sat

in summer: considered the chicory,
drawn the blue bridge flung
from bank to bank, or wondered

the names of the red flowers,
their throats like trumpets.
How many times I've not

given in to the weeping:
I can almost see her— the one
who lifts the Potomac mud

to her face and smears,
as if it were a balm and not
the original problem,

or the one with the bucket of fish:
she should return them but that would mean
letting them slip, silver and whole,

finally cast out. I'd rather
let them wander in the maples,
cold and insistent and crying.

I should swim somehow— wait
for spring; I've been waving
to that other a long time,

the one who wears the red
and not the blue scarf.

© Mary Walker Graham 2008

Susan Wallack: January 2007

EVOLUTION

Once before, when I was a woman,
(a diagram distorting the actual
dream),

I hiked a leg,
barking like a seal, &
urinated a long-
lemon stream.

Running south,
syrup over ice
cream, pleasure
over suffering:
the first idea.


© Susan Wallack 2007

Susan Wallack: February 2021

At times God seems
Like a scientist to me,
Patient & persistent,

Experiments still pending
Stashed in a shoe box
On Heaven's marble floor.

And from time to time,
Say once in an aeon,
He lifts the corner

Gingerly, as if not
To disturb us,
Checking on progress,

Then lowers the lid
And inscribes
The statistics.

© Susan Wallack 2021

Susan Wallack: June 2021

Consider life's billion anxious
gulps of oxygen, smog porridge
sucked ad nauseam. If a wily

Camus invites us to agree
that Sisyphus is happy, I'm
satisfied to dream Camus'

Algeria: super-heated sands
hemming the Mediterranean,
and a raucous newborn

gleaming with slime, a just-plucked
shell held high into the sun. Her
nomad-father's rutted palms

obliterate all light, his desert-
dimmed eyes squinting to find
stripes, moles, stigma, signs—

imperfections to justify
a drowning. No surprise. Just too few
dried figs, no gods or fires

driving them forward, into the sea,
ancient terrors, shallow waters
heaving salt, fish, history.

originally published in The Brownstone Review No. 5

© Susan Wallack

Susan Wallack: October 2023

Death's young, lush, smooth skinned, canny,
posed au naturel, cocoa belly
down on an improvised divan, eyes

rolled back to study Gauguin (who
flatters himself she's scared of him). Slapping
liverish paint to a faux

background, fantasy blooms
where the native truth would be: an endless
queue of stunted men,

shuffling forward, shifting dumbly
outside thatched huts infested with fleas.
Inside Death squirms, ever horny, flexing

moist pink lips as if he were a child,
slow to see where to fix his bristling
prick, bury Art, take his pleasure now.

originally published in the G.W. Review, spring 1999

The Khyber Pass: July 5, 2005

It’s my humble opinion that Philadelphia is ready to take its place among the great cities of the world. Many define us by our proximity to Manhattan; an easy mistake to make. After all, Manhattan is widely acknowledged as perhaps the world’s greatest city. Over years of shuttling back and forth, I’ve learned to love Philly and Manhattan equally, for different reasons. The exuberant excess of Manhattan is intoxicating but exhausting. Philly is a “Middle Path” town, and if it doesn’t stagger us with raw velocity, we’re able to function here without exhaustion. Manhattan is glamorous but expensive. Philly is short on glamour, long on substance, and we can live here without going bankrupt. Ultimately, Philly and New York are sister cities, with much more in common than not. East Coast, liberal, each with its own Ivy League school, cynical, earthy, brutal summers, brutal winters, gorgeous springs and falls, great art museums, architecture, wonderful pungent neighborhoods.

So, the tale of The Philly Free School is becoming a tale of two cities. The specter of a third hangs over the whole endeavor— London. From ’64 to ’70, London swung harder than any other city in recent memory. How could it not, with Lennon, Hendrix, Jagger, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Genet, Hockney, Bacon, and Godard hanging from the rafters. The Philly Free School inherited its name from The London Free School, who were perhaps the first multi-media artists’ co-op ever. The London Free School made stars out of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, promoted poets like Alex Trocchi, turned churches into psychedelic cathedrals. They introduced the “light show” in 1966, when The Beatles were still singing “Yellow Submarine.” Thus, The Philly Free School has a lot to live up to, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

We don’t merely want to recreate Swinging London. We want to create an analogous environment with Philly and New York artists right now. We want Philly and New York to join together in song, poem, and story, to break new ground and start a new chapter of reciprocity and encouragement between these two great cities. We’re gathered here tonight to help inaugurate this endeavor. “Poetry Incarnation” at the Royal Albert Hall in London, 1965, introduced Ginsberg and Corso into an already fertile, volatile mix. Who knows who among you might be a Ginsberg or a Corso? Even if you don’t happen to be Allen Ginsberg, you still deserve a time and place to “Howl.” The Philly Free School exists so that anyone who wants a forum by which to express anything can do so. That was the belief that inspired the original “Poetry Incarnation,” and that’s the belief that spurred us into creating “Poetry Incarnation ’05.”

What’s in the future for The Philly Free School? The possibilities seem limitless. How many fledgling artists are there in Philly and New York? Tons! Many of them are talented, too. It’s our purpose and our mission to cross genre-zones and find the poets, musicians, painters, filmmakers, novelists, and performance artists who are taking the right risks, shaking up the right conventions, assaulting the right boundaries, cracking the right codes. We have the grandiose ambition to rock NYC and Philly so hard that a baby is born between them. A love-child that knows how to swing; a freedom-child that knows how to Howl. We’re going out into the world with that passion in our soul, and we want you to join us! Welcome to “Poetry Incarnation ’05.”

Adam Fieled

From Otoliths: April 2010

In 2004 and 2005, a group of young artists who called themselves the Philly Free School staged a series of performances at the Highwire Gallery, in the now-demolished Gilbert Building on Cherry Street, Philadelphia. The stated goal of these performances was “multi-media”: as such, they involved poetry, music, fiction, films, and different hybrid/mutant versions of these. What I want to address, specifically, is the poetry aspect of these performances. These seem relevant to me now because multi-media presentations of poetry are, to many, significantly more interesting than standard poetry readings, which are (I would argue) an impoverished form of public expression. What constitutes the impoverishment of poetry readings as public art events? Let’s put the question in different terms: what does a poetry reading offer an average audience?

An audience at a standard poetry reading is offered an anti-spectacle— a single man or woman, reading from sheets or a book, often looking down at this book while intermittently gazing up at his or her audience. Why look at something or someone static, and (for the most part) inexpressive? This is the first level of impoverishment. Then, as to the contents of poems read in a public context: are most poems compelling enough, as works of literature, to merit public airing? The truth is that most serious poems do not read that well out loud— poems (good ones) contain enormous amounts of compressed data, which necessitates slow, ocular engagement. Lines that need to be read three or four times to be properly processed pass with such rapidity, in a reading context, that they might as well be Greek as English. Moreover, attendees have two options— to make an earnest attempt to understand things instantly, or to drift off into reverie. The latter has consistently been my choice (and I have, fortunately or unfortunately, sat through dozens of readings).

But the Philly Free School artists (of which I was one) started from the presupposition that poetry could be mixed with Artaud; that public poetry is, in fact, better as a side-dish than as a main course; and that the possibilities of “spectacles” were (and remain) more exciting than more conventional poetry contexts. As such, the Philly Free School shows (which were well-attended but received little media coverage) presented, in general, little in the way of conventional poetry performances; poetry was mixed with video and music to create novel effects. I was proud to contribute to these performances, because they had not only young energies but principles behind them. While I would not deny that results were mixed (some ideas came off, some did not), I have yet to see another concentrated attempt to make poetry multi-media in a public forum. We were using artful language as texture, the way a painter might use brushstrokes, and an inquiry into this usage (language-as-texture) revealed untapped possibilities as regards making poetry interesting to audiences, who may or may not find poetry interesting to begin with.

When language is used as texture, as a constituent part of a spectacle that also includes sound and images, the audience (ideally) feels itself immersed or engulfed in a dynamic collage; as such, this kind of performance is an extension of the Modernist ethos. Fractured things can be more compelling than wholes; this was one tenet that motivated Pound, Eliot, and the rest. For an audience, sitting in a darkened room (and the Highwire offered two main spaces, a conventional gallery space and a warehouse space), this sense of brokenness could be interpreted many ways, but the essential thing for us was to present something that was dynamic, rather than static. The most elaborate of these presentations involved music, images, and poetry at once; while it would be reasonable to question whether the total effect was bombastic or not, the responses we received encouraged us to believe that what we were doing was significantly more exciting than an average poetry performance. Live poetry, I would argue, only works as texture to begin with; it is in the mix of things that live poetry comes alive. In the specific performances that I was personally involved with, I did, in fact, read entire poems; if I had it to do over again, I would not. It would have been substantially more appropriate to read fragments or even to improvise. The video collages were put together from foreign movies, Internet, music video, and photography bits. The musical elements alone were entirely improvised. Although I am proud of what the Philly Free School accomplished, it was merely a beginning. Thinking about it now, we could have been much more rigorous. Our ideas of spectacle were naïve, and needed development.

What would a completely successful poetry spectacle, in the Artaudian sense, look like? Artaud, of course, became famous for his idea/ideal of the Theater of Cruelty; a spectacle that confronts an audience with its own mortality, in an unflinching, persistent way. What kind of poetry fragments could add, textually, to such a spectacle? It seems to me that the poetry would have to be written specifically in conjunction with, specifically for, the music and the images. They would have to function, in other words, dramatically, as carriers of a certain kind of drama, just as dialogue in a theater production does. What can poetry contribute that mere dialogue cannot? Poetry has in its arsenal a capacity for incantatory power that dialogue does not; an ability to build, to create rhythms, melodies, and cadences that dialogue cannot. Anaphora is one method by which this kind of fragment could work; rhyme is another. This is texture that creates stimulation; with other elements, the potentiality for genuine spectacle, cohesive spectacle (rather than naïve, haphazard spectacle) arises. As to what the spectacle addresses, there is no real limitation, other than the impulse to compel attention, hold it, and overwhelm at once. Certainly the apocalyptic conflicts in the Middle East, our flagging domestic economy, and the status of the environment are all fertile (pardon my irony) ground.

Then, there are things standing in the way of this kind of spectacle: time and budgets are big ones. Many poets just skirt insolvency; serious spectacle (unfortunately) often involves serious funds. The Philly Free School were lucky with this, more so than we realized; the Highwire let us use the space for free (though they took a cut of the door). But to come up with ample space, time, and funds is a real challenge, which cannot be solved overnight. It may come down to a collective, like the Philly Free School, to make this happen, if it does ever happen. To my mind, it would be a tragedy if it does not. There are, in general, too few poetry readings that have any capacity to stimulate, and too many that wind up being “snooze-fests.” The irony, for one working in an experimental context, is that avant-garde poetry readings tend to be even more boring than mainstream ones— abstruse poetry out loud, which shuns narrative, is more difficult to follow, and often registers as little better than gibberish. But I will simply say, for myself, that the desire to create a genuine spectacle with poetry has not perished, and I hope other kindred spirits are “waiting in the wings.”

Adam Fieled

From Philadelphia City Paper: June-July 2005

“I want Poetry Incarnation ’05 to mirror the original London event in its scope and in its egalitarian structure. That is, I designed this event so that almost anyone that wanted to read could read,” says Adam Fieled. He and Mike Land, co-director of the Philly Free School— a multi-media arts co-op— are bringing a slew of poets together in one space to not only give each a chance to showcase his or her work, but to solidify poetry as an important element of the arts. “It would be nice if people would have the realization that poetry is still a vital, viable force in American culture. It would also be nice to prove once again that Philly is, in fact, a great poetry town, a place rich with literacy, poetic history and culture,” explains Fieled. But with over 40 participants slated to read, the organizers have also pulled prose writers and editors into the mix. There are recognizable names, such as published noteworthies CaConrad and Jenn McCreary, while others are fresh voices aching to be heard. Known for indie rock and hip-hop shows, The Khyber hopes to get a crowd that wouldn’t normally spend a Tuesday evening listening to haikus, free verse, and limericks. “I want people who come to this event to walk away thrilled and exhilarated by its diversity.”

Deesha Dyer

Vlad Pogorelov: April 2020

Being low on inspiration in the middle of the train station
Trying to find a decent rhyme or the place to go
Feeling very cheap like an amateur with a third class ticket

Isn't it a crime, a very major crime of nature
When you're subjected to not being able to find a
Rhyme or a decent woman?

But fuck the nature! Let's break this glass wall!
Go outside, be artificial but independent
And vice versa...Do you still like the verse?
In the meantime returning to the original style:
- Shut up and smile.

Nothing helps better than looking at polyester shirts,
Clear plastic skirts, synthetics and vinyl
Aluminum in the form of foil paper
Or listening to your last words:
- See ya later
When you don't mean it.

Paper, another artificial object. Nailing words to it,
Letting them dry and being absorbed
Feeling like a medieval knight holding his medieval sword,
Killing enemies,
Splashing blood just like ink, when the ink is just like blood

God! God! God! And the Virgin Mary. Here is the letter:
Dear Mary! Would you love me, would you fuck me?
I'll be very gentle, very caring.
I'll treat you nice, Mary. I am not exactly from Palestine,
But please, do not hesitate
To accept some very valuable foreign aid in the form of a 
Smile.

And Mary's telegram says:
Wait! You're not a carpenter, you're a poet.
So go fuck your Muse or your mom.
The end of the telegram.

My reply: Dear Mary! Thank you for the advice.
Still want to fuck you. Love you very, very.

And back to the train station.
Where would I go without an inspiration,
Without a rhyme or a decent woman?
New York? Moscow? Near past? Distant future?
After all, the crime is becoming a punishment
When you try to cut your soul open.


c. Vlad Pogorelov

At the Train Station was originally included in the 1997 print chapbook Derelict, from Repossessed Head Press.

Vlad Pogorelov: September 2020

I wanted to kill myself for years
But I always lived on the first floor
And the gun shops won't sell a gun
To a foreigner with a criminal background
It's not that there are no other ways to do it
I dreamt of drinking myself to death
But after hours of puking
I discovered that life is O.K.
As long as you don't have to punch
Somebody's time-clock
Or when you're drunk but are still
Able to drive
And the classical music
Or a beautiful woman,
Or a decent typewriter,
Or a good friend,
Who is not asking you for some
Cash until Friday, every other day

At the moment,
I am still alive
We made love 3 times last night
It's 2:20 p.m.
I had two cups of tea,
Three cigarettes,
Plus some beer for breakfast
My woman is in the shower
She lives on the third floor
(Too low to jump
and I don't want to be crippled)

P.S.: She came out of the shower.
Looked at the first line. Put her hands
On my shoulders and said firmly:
"If you're gonna kill yourself, I'm gonna
Kill you, son of a bitch. Besides,
I don't need blood in my apartment."

© 1997

Vlad Pogorelov: March 2021

"You're an enigma," she said
You're an enigma
I know all about you
At least more than the other girls
Her kiss was sweet and warm
Alcohol and perfume
I couldn't look in her eyes
              "Yea....Yea," I said
              "I don't want to be exposed
                             It's not good for you"
               "For me?" she asked
               "It's O.K. for me," she repeated
               "You talk gibberish," I said
We kissed some more
Then she went to the bathroom
To snort
Ha! She liked cocaine
"God damn enigma," I thought
While drinking some lager
And when I lighted a cigarette
A black man came up to me
And asked me if I was queer. 

Vlad Pogorelov: September 2023

Mosquitoes,
Cockroaches, and
Spiders
My lovely roommates
and my only true friends
I love you
I love you
I love you
In a sick kind of love
Which will make an executioner happy
And the victim will suffer no more
Only pleasure from the torture
And the pain has no right to exist

And some time my eyes are
Staring at you: big, lonely spider
You are sitting in the darkest corner
Of your dusty net
Waiting for me to get in

And I know for sure
That a giant mosquito
Made his home
Inside my swollen heart
There is plenty of blood
Inside those chambers

And when I can't hear you clearly,
When you are talking to me on the phone
I feel that a cockroach is moving
Inside of my ear

And sometimes I feel
That there is nothing to feel anymore
Ever since my soul was amputated
And smuggled to India
By a gynecologist
Who was seeing my mother
Long time ago, before I was born

So,
Mosquitoes,
Cockroaches,
and Spiders,
You are my only friends,
Who are sharing my soulless fate,
Abandoned by lovers,
Forgotten by long-time friends,
Forsaken by my motherland and the ancient gods
I am living a sheltered life
As a derelict

And it seems like it's time
To jump into the water of a substance,
Which looks like a residential street
Or a boiling sea
Depends on the point of view
Or the angle of the mind
Or just walk out the door
And swim to the store...
Buy some cheap liquor...
Go back home...
To this slow SINKING ship
And to share my fate
With my only true friends
With my only true love
With mosquitoes,
     cockroaches,
     and spiders
'Cause I am a derelict
And I am living a sheltered life

c. Vladlen Pogorelov 1997-2023

Vlad Pogorelov: October 2023

Experiencing her body 
Next to mine 
It felt warm and very close 
It had the smell of alcohol 
She was laughing like crazy 
And talking 
And swinging 
Looking at me 
From time to time 
Drinking 
I was drinking too 
And smoking 
An easy way to deal with life 
Easy 
Old easy way 
And I was so happy 
Happy just because of her presence 
Beside me 
With her soft hair 
Flying around my neck 
I didn’t wanna bother to 
Ask her name 
Instead, I asked for a cigarette 
And she gave me her last one 
I bet she would have given me 
All of her 
If I’d asked her 
But I was happy with things 
As they were 
So I just kept drinking, 
Smoking and writing on 
The napkin of very poor quality 
Finally, she asked me, 
“What are you writing?” 
“I’m writing shit… 
I’m writing nothing… 
I’m writing a letter to my wife… 
Any more questions?” 
“What?” 
She didn’t hear me 
It was too noisy in the bar. 

All published poems on P.F.S. Post by Vlad Pogorelov taken from the 1997 print chapbook Derelict, published in Philadelphia by Repossessed Head Press.